Gradually, this clamor of eyes also ceased and they became emotionally very close; started caring for each other and all the fuss died, but the mutual conversation still remained cut. Since, the people knew it when they decided if they didn’t talk with each other then why to speak with other people. And, they also stopped talking with all others too — their parents, sister, maternal and paternal relatives, cousins, and the fellow villagers — and started using their own framed dactylology while conversing with all others, too, who didn’t know their eye-language, left school and started to help their father in the fields.

Even, they kept mum when their father died of a snake bite and they brought his carcass from the field, crying and wailing. They didn’t even talk with the condolers. Even, they didn’t utter a word to tell anyone how the snake bit their father. People took their own meanings with the gestures of their hands. On arrival of mourners from their own village or some nearby settlement, they lifted their hands for prayer and nodded over the words for condolence and sympathy. The condolers muttered about the dumbness of both brothers instead of customarily applauding and remembering good deeds of their deceased father.

The weird story of their hush-up spread all around, gradually. They were born good talkative but God’s will that they became dumb; they were twins, if they weren’t one of them shouldn’t have had been dumb at least. Every one expressed his own speculation. And, they became popular with the title of “Twins of the dumb.”

They even didn’t break their silence when their mother died, and the condolers — instead of offering them their condolence — made both brothers’ dumbness subject of their gossip sorrowfully as they did earlier on the occasion of their father’s death. They listened to the compassionate chit-chat about them and felt heat of peoples’ pitiful eyes over their faces because they didn’t made themselves deaf and blind. They writhed in anger, gnashed their teeth, and snorted. Their lips and cheeks twitched in agony.

They wanted to throw them out of their house. But they solaced each other and advised endurance by exchange of looks. They also decided that again — whenever any of them died because now only two of them had remained — they won’t lay out the mourners’ mat. And, when people returned from the mosque after offering Namaz-e-Zohar (the prayer of noon), the mats had been removed. Hence, the mourners, even from nearby or far-away settlements — who had arrived for consolation but caused more grief — returned to their homes, murmuring against this uncustomary act of both the brothers.

And, they didn’t also break the padlocks they had put on their tongues when their sister Hameeda’n came to live with them after getting stigma of divorce and infamy. She always reproached them, taking the stance that they materialized her divorce and ignominy; why didn’t they side with her when her in-laws shunted her out of the home, blaming that her husband caught her red handed copulating with their tenant? Why didn’t they wrangle with them? Why didn’t they brawl with them that their still virgin sister had done this to bear a child for them — because her husband was impotent? Off course, they could also ask: why and how she kept her virginity intact even after four years of her marriage with an impotent?

It was their tenant who had entered first into her little crevice, opening it wide with his hammer like cock; and who had to leave after harvest forever, paying remaining amount of tenancy and their share of crop, plus they had child in gratis. (But her in-laws blamed her of being generous enough over the villagers and other men of the nearby settlements.) She shouted her arguments before her in-laws and the village arbitration council, which was summoned by her without bringing it into the notice of her brothers. If they helped out her, and encouraged her, she had forced her in-laws to fall on their backs, defeated them and had still been living with her husband and with her child, too — happily and honorably.

They also kept quiet, when Hameeda’n gave birth to the tenant’s dead baby and her laments pierced their ears. For months she imprecated her brothers and in-laws, beating her chest. Then, one day she disappeared. Where had she gone? Nobody knew. And when she returned, she had a bag full of new dresses and sandals. Both the brothers sat her before them and stared. She began to wrap and then un-wrap a corner of her dupatta in pretence, looking at them stealthily. They peeped into each other’s eyes. Then, Sagheer put her metallic rod like stout finger under her chin and pitilessly pushed her face up.

Their eyes started to make slow and fast movements in circles, up and down, from the internal corner to the external one and vice versa; head shaking, nodding and jolting. Hameeda’n felt that those eyes showed anger this time, then begging, and then soliciting. Their eyes also showed other impressions, which she could not understand utterly. They stood and their hands fought with air. They also stamped frequently on the earth. At last, they — noticing their sister’s imposturous abashment of repentance — peeped into each other’s eyes, which made some bizarre movements, and they left silently.

Their silence was not unreasoned. Because, they knew when one becomes addicted to gooey organs one cannot get rid of its hedonism. As the saying goes: the stolen molasses is sweeter; so, its sweetness has great rapture and severity of heat that one’s body becomes hot even in the frozen weather. Everything burns to ashes, and revolts to ravage everything upraises like the expanded head of a cobra.